


A New Vantage

by Donda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Bodyswap, Gen, Insomnia, Remix, Target Practice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 10:27:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11826819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donda/pseuds/Donda
Summary: A midnight bout of target practice for two sleepless road warriors takes an unexpected turn when they each find themselves transposed into the wrong body. Whether they're prepared for it or not, they're about to be closer to each other than they ever thought they would be.A remix ofLivia_LeRynn'sficTarget Practicefor the Mad Max: Fury Remix challenge.





	A New Vantage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Livia_LeRynn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livia_LeRynn/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Target Practice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9572204) by [Livia_LeRynn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livia_LeRynn/pseuds/Livia_LeRynn). 



> Someone once suggested I try a bodyswap AU, and I never got very far on that one, but I felt that _Target Practice_ lent itself well to the platonic intimacy of something like a bodyswap. There was a lot of trust in the original fic, and I wanted to give these two the chance to see that trust from a different vantage point. Also crazy AUs are apparently my gimmick anyway, so why not?

She had invited him into her room that first night he had come back to the Citadel, saying she thought he’d find it more comfortable than the other options available. And it was comfortable, in its own way. The cot she brought in for him the second night made it more comfortable - he could still be by her, feel safe in her proximity, but they didn’t have to squeeze onto a sleeping platform made for one.  
  
They settled into a comfortable routine this way, sleeping back-to-back, as if each was guarding the other’s blind spot. Max wouldn’t say he ever sleeps particularly well, but he was surprised to find that he sleeps better here than most places. Nightmares still tear him from his sleep and he wakes up swinging, but Furiosa doesn’t seem to mind too much. If he keeps his back to her, he rarely actually hits her, though he knows she wakes up every time he does. But if it bothered her, she would kick him out, right? Or at least have him move the cot away from her bed platform. She never says anything, just lies tensely until Max relaxes, and then he feels her slowly relax against him again.  
  
She doesn’t sleep much better than he does, though she’s less prone to waking up fighting like he is. This night is one of those nights, though, when something must be on her mind and she lies awake. He can feel the restlessness like an energy radiating from her, but she doesn’t get up, probably doesn’t want to disturb him.  
  
It’s not until she sighs that he decides to admit that he’s not actually sleeping either. “Not fooling anyone.”  
  
“Go back to sleep,” she responds with another sigh.  
  
“Can’t sleep either,” he says without moving. He might have been sleeping - sometimes it’s hard for him to tell when he actually does - but if she’s restless, he’ll be restless, and he won’t be able to sleep then. After a moment he rolls over to face her and relaxes into the cot again, his mind still a little foggy. He’s close enough to smell her on each slow inhale, to feel her body heat, but not quite touching her, a compromise between a need for touch and his refusal to admit to it, even to himself.  
  
Furiosa sits up suddenly.  
  
“Mm?” He asks, concerned something’s wrong.  
  
“I have to get out.”  
  
He moves for her as she climbs quickly across his cot and gets up, and he watches quietly as she pulls on an extra layer of clothing. Apparently it wasn’t just a general need to get up, she’s actually going somewhere. “Where to?” He doesn’t know if he’s invited wherever she plans to go, but he’s curious either way.  
  
“Out,” is all she says, and Max sits up fully, now awake enough that there’s no sense in even trying to go back to sleep. She looks back at him. “You coming?”  
  
“Mm-hm,” he answers without much thought. He hopes she means out-out. He always feels a little cramped inside these stone walls, and wouldn’t mind some air. He reaches for his knee brace and starts to slide it on.  
  
“Good.” She lights a lamp, making him squint briefly until his pupils adjust. “I need to get under you,” she says, crouching down to reach under the cot before he even gets a chance to move out of her way.  
  
He scoots aside and she brings out a crossbow.  
  
“How about some target practice?”  
  
A smile pulls at his lips. “Mm,” he says in agreement. That actually sounds perfect right about now.  
  
She leads him up to the top of the Citadel and out into the open night air. Max breathes it in as they pass by rows of crops, and finds himself looking up at the stars. They’re familiar, reliable. Always the same no matter where he goes. Furiosa stops in a clearing and he watches silently as she sets up a sandbag on top of a chest and steps back to the other side of the clearing.  
  
“Best move, Fool,” she says with a touch of playfulness to her voice.  
  
Max hides a small smile. She knows his name, but he has to admit he’s becoming a little fond of the nickname, at least when it comes from her. Sometimes the others use it, when they’re trying to be friendly, or joking around at Max’s expense, but it doesn’t feel like their name to use. He wouldn’t go as far as to say Furiosa is the only one allowed to call him a fool, but she is the only one from whom it feels endearing in its own way.  
  
He moves across the clearing to stand next to her and watches as she readies the crossbow for the first shot. She hadn’t put her prosthetic on before they left, but it doesn’t slow her down by much. He feels like he forgets sometimes that she’s missing part of her arm. She doesn’t let it define her, barely lets it hinder her, even when she’s not wearing the metal prosthetic. Things like this, loading a crossbow, are the kinds of things a person with two intact hands just doesn’t really think much about. He hadn’t even considered, when she first picked up the crossbow in her room, that it might have been a bit of an impractical weapon for her right now. It was just a fact that of course she owns a crossbow, and of course she can use it. She uses her body to make up for the lack of hand, and in about as much time as it would take him to load it, she finishes and stands up straight, aiming the crossbow at the target across the clearing.  
  
_Thunk_. The first shot lands neatly in the middle of the sandbag, and she reloads the crossbow to fire again.  
  
After a few shots, she lowers the crossbow and rubs her side with her left forearm. That’s another thing Max frequently forgets - she’s still healing from the wounds of that hard-won battle. She doesn’t let it slow her down, and if it still hurts her, she barely shows it.  
  
“Want a shot?”  
  
He shrugs. “Like watching you.” He doesn’t think he could match her nice cluster of bolts in the center of the sandbag anyway. Not that this is a competition, they both know she’s the better shot, and he has more desire to watch her skill than to practice his own.  
  
“I need a break, actually. Drawing - fuck…” She rubs her side again. Even in the safety of this place, even among friends, it’s a rare thing for Furiosa to show that her wounds are bothering her. “I need to do this more often get my strength back. It can be easy again.”  
  
Max is in awe of her ability to bounce back. She had been stabbed - twice - not that long ago, one of them bad enough to have nearly taken her life. And here she is, not too long out of the woods and already working on getting past the wounds. He wonders what it would be like to actually care about something like that. Not that he doesn’t care when he gets injured, but he has always just accepted that things change with his body and he has to get used to it. She does not. She won’t accept even the slightest weakness if she can help it. He knows she’s been through shit as bad as he has - things that nearly killed her - and yet he can’t help but feel she probably doesn’t have nearly the number of stiff joints and constant aches that he does.  
  
Furiosa doesn’t realize it, but as she passes the crossbow over to him, her thoughts are running along the same vein. Her own body had been the one and only thing she could truly depend on for a long time. She takes care of it, keeps it in shape, keeps it strong, so it can keep up with any challenge life will throw at her. Max is not the same. She has a feeling he tends to neglect his injuries. She’s noticed him massaging stiffness or pain out of a few joints, and while she doesn’t know how he got most of his old injuries, she does know that the right care and attention after something happens can often keep it from being a big problem later. But Max just lets these things pile on him. His knee obviously pains him, and even with the brace on it she can tell it doesn’t bend or support him exactly as it should. His joints pop, sometimes badly enough that he’ll grimace. His left hand is stiff and sometimes clumsy. If she were him, especially living out in the wastes, she would take better care of her body.  
  
As his hand connects with the crossbow in hers, a strange sensation jolts through her, almost a shock, electricity sparking down her limbs. The next thing she knows, she’s not handing off the crossbow by its handle, but taking it by the foregrip. Her gaze darts from the crossbow in her hand, up the arm holding the other end of it, and her eyes settle on her own face. There’s a momentary look of confusion on the face in front of her, and then it slowly transitions to a mix of shock and fear. Her body lets go of the crossbow suddenly and stumbles back away from her a couple steps. Furiosa herself tries to contain the panic she feels crawling its way up through her chest at the sight of herself from the outside. She’s had dreams like this, where she’s looking on from outside, there but not there, part of events but not herself, and they’re never good. Yet at the same time, they’re not as jarring as she finds this moment to be.  
  
She looks quickly down at herself, and her gaze focuses immediately on the left hand. It’s there, whole and undamaged. Well, mostly undamaged. She flexes the fingers, shocked to feel them move despite the fact that she can see them right in front of her eyes. She tightens the hand into a fist and relaxes it again. How long had it been since she’d felt anything but phantom pains in this arm?  
  
But she knows these hands just as well as she knows the leather jacket and ratty brown shirt covering the arms. This isn’t just some out-of-body experience. She’s in Max’s body.  
  
She looks up beside her again and finds her body staring down at its right hand and the remains of its left forearm.  
  
“Max…?” She tries carefully. It comes out as a low grunt, an alien sound within her head despite her familiarity with the voice.  
  
Her own eyes dart up to her, a look of confused shock still on her face, an expression she’s pretty sure that face has almost never made since she was a child. “What is this?” Even her own voice replying to her seems not quite as she’s used to hearing it.  
  
“I don’t know,” she admits, then looks down at the crossbow in her hand. “It happened just as I handed this over…” She holds the weapon out to him again. Reversing the process seems like the most likely way to fix whatever just happened.  
  
He reaches out slowly, with a shaking hand, and takes the other end of the crossbow again. There’s no jolt. No swap. They both stay in the wrong body.  
  
Max lets go again with a grunt that sounds strange coming from Furiosa’s body.  
  
They try a few more times. Furiosa tries holding the other end of the crossbow as she hands it back to him. They try switching where they’re standing. They try recreating the moment when it first happened. After they’ve passed the crossbow back and forth several times and still find themselves swapped into each other’s bodies, Max finally gives a helpless shrug, at a loss for what to do.  
  
“’S not working. Something else? Maybe just time…?”  
  
Furiosa looks down at her arms again. This is not an optimal situation, and she’s sure Max would agree, but what can they do? They don’t even understand how this happened to begin with. “If we have to stay like this… Do we hide it from everyone?”  
  
Max shakes his head. “I can’t be you.”  
  
“I think I might be able to pass as you,” Furiosa says honestly.  
  
Max lets out a little laugh. “Not too hard. Just grunt more than talk.”  
  
Furiosa cracks a smile despite the situation. She had always wondered if he was aware that he was doing that.  
  
The crossbow is still clutched in her hand, and she stares down at it. There’s not much else they can do at the moment. There’s no sense in running around in a panic, and she doubts anybody else could help them with this. Hell, they wouldn’t even believe them. So why not finish what they came up here for? She’s certainly not going back to sleep now, and she’s still got the tension that brought them here in the first place. Or maybe Max had it too. She’s not sure if the tension she’s feeling now came over with her mind, or was in this body to begin with. Besides, now she’s curious. She draws the crossbow easily with her left hand, then looks over toward Max. He stares back blankly for a moment, then seems to suddenly realize what she wants, and goes fumbling (a little awkwardly) in the wraps of his shirt for one of the crossbow bolts she had tucked there.  
  
She loads the bolt after he hands it to her and takes aim. _Thunk_. She squints at where the bolt landed in the sandbag - just on the edge - and makes a low sound of frustration. She knows this weapon and knows how to shoot, but Max’s body doesn’t work and move quite like hers. She holds out her hand to him without taking her eyes off the target, and loads a second bolt when he puts it in her palm. The second shot misses the center of the target by nearly as much as the first, and she instantly puts her hand out for another bolt. He hands her a third, and this time she takes more careful aim, taking and releasing a slow breath while adjusting for the differences she can feel in his arms. _Thunk_. The bolt pierces the sandbag in the middle of the cluster of shots she made when she had been in her own body. After a few more shots, she’s confident that she has the hang of this.  
  
“Want to try now?” She offers the crossbow to him, and hopes that this time will be different, that this pass will switch them back into their own bodies. But the crossbow leaves her hand, and nothing else changes. She steps aside to make room for him and watches absently as he attempts to load the crossbow, mimicking what he had seen her do, but lacking the practice she has.  
  
She focuses on the feelings in her arms and legs and chest, all too conscious of the intimacy of being in another person’s body. She feels what he must feel, aches and stiffness from old injuries that are not entirely unfamiliar to her, though all in different places, and perhaps worse than hers ever are. She always did her best to work out the remnants of old injuries, to restrengthen weaknesses, to get her body back to the way it was supposed to work. She knows now that she was right about him neglecting his injuries. His body still serves him well, he still survives to the end of each day even through the hardships the Wasteland throws at him out there, but he must just learn to work around the difficulties caused by injuries rather than try to get his body back into the same shape it was in before the injury.  
  
Max fumbles with the crossbow, finally getting it cocked and loaded. He doesn’t think he’d ever be able to get used to this, hopes he won’t have to. Everything feels different, most notably the lack of a left hand. In the back of his mind, he can still feel it, though more a deep muscle pain than any other sensation. He kept trying to use his left hand automatically while he loaded the crossbow, even knowing it wasn’t there. It would be a hard thing to adjust to. The rest of her body feels so light compared his own, lighter on the muscle but still very strong, and he feels a lack of pain in places he hadn’t even been aware were hurting in his body. With the exception of the ribs, that is. He puts the nub of his arm against his side, grimacing slightly at the pain of the recent and still-healing injury.  
  
But now he knows. This is what it is like for her. Easier, yet harder in all different ways. He respects her even more now that he understands her better. She always made functioning with one arm look so seamless and easy, like she had always been that way.  
  
He tries not to think too much more about the fact that this is her body, not his, beside the obvious and the superficial. It was a big enough step for him to have come back here in the first place, keeping a connection with someone after what felt like a lifetime of walking away from people and never looking back. Being in her body is a whole new level of connection that he’s quite sure he’s not prepared for, an intimacy he never even imagined before. Yet at the same time, he finds his mind wandering back and refocusing on every single thing he can feel in this body that is not like his own. This is what she feels. This is what the world looks like through her eyes. Still, he tries not to let his hand even brush against himself, as if the simple touch of it is crossing too far past a line.  
  
Her hand is steadier by far than his when he aims, and he expected this to be hard too, but the first bolt lands true, right in the center of the target. Beside him, Furiosa huffs.  
  
He makes a surprised sound at the ease of it. “Muscle memory,” he guesses. He has never fired this crossbow in his life, and yet this body knows just how to handle it, responds to each quirk of its function without him having to think about it.  
  
They pass it back and forth a couple times, Furiosa getting better with Max’s body, her aim steadily becoming as reliable as she is used to it in her own body. Even Max adjusts a bit, becoming more confident in his abilities in Furiosa’s body.  
  
“This is easier than I thought it would be,” Furiosa says, watching him hit the target flawlessly yet again.  
  
“If we hadn’t swapped…” Max starts quietly, “I’d up the ante.” He eyes a sack of potatoes across the clearing.  
  
“What’s stopping you?”  
  
Max motions generally to himself - her body - and Furiosa furrows her brow, not understanding.  
  
“Dangerous. If you miss,” he clarifies. “Don’t want to hurt… you.” He’s not sure if it really counts as her anymore. Sure, it’s technically still her body, but would hurting it matter to her if she never inhabits it again?  
  
Furiosa scoffs. “Do it.”  
  
Still, Max hesitates. If it were his body, he would. It’s not that he trusts her any less with the safety of her own body, or shooting in his, but now he is directly responsible for her body’s safety, and somehow, that feels a lot more important to him than his own safety would. He shakes his head. It’s not worth it for a little game. “Couldn’t,” he admits. He couldn’t stand there and watch her aim a crossbow in the direction of her own body any more than he could stand there now and aim a crossbow at her himself.  
  
“I’ll do it,” she decides. If Max would have, she doesn’t see the harm. And if he would have taken a possible risk for her, she’s curious. Curious what it feels like, curious to understand where he’s coming from.  
  
She follows his gaze over to the sack of potatoes, and quickly pieces together what he’s probably thinking. She crosses to it and picks two potatoes - one in each hand, simply because she has two flesh hands and she can now - and heads toward the target. Max looks a little unsure as she stops next to the target, but not as unsure as he had looked when he was considering putting her body next to the target. He motions to the top of his head, and she smirks a little, imagining what he would look like standing here with a potato on his head.  
  
“Second one on the sandbag,” he grunts as an afterthought. His aim is better now than it has been in a long time, but that doesn’t mean he won’t take the opportunity for a practice shot before he takes the real one.  
  
She places one on top of the sandbag and balances the other on her head, then crosses her arms and stares across at him with a steady gaze as he draws and loads the crossbow. Her gaze is deceptive. She feels the familiar buzz of adrenaline spreading through Max’s body, just the same as she knows it in her own body. She almost reaches up to take the potato off her head again. Even if it was his idea, is it really her place to put his body at risk like this? She doesn’t want to see him get hurt. In fact, she realizes now that that fear is the same feeling that woke her up tonight. She knew Max would be leaving soon, that as soon as his car was fixed he’d be gone, and she worries. She worries she’ll miss him, that she’ll never see him again, but deeper than that, hidden beneath, she worries about his safety out there. She fears he’ll get hurt somewhere far away and there wouldn’t be a single thing she could do to help him. Hell, she wouldn’t even know. She worries about his safety in this moment too, but holds herself still. Her hands grip against the shaking that starts up in them and she focuses on the sensations. This is what he would be feeling if he were here. This thrill, the beat of his heart in his chest, the natural response to the risk they’re taking. The body is different, but the feeling is not.  
  
Across the clearing, Max shakes his head, backing down from the challenge. “This is stupid.”  
  
“It’s not,” she says.  
  
Max closes his mouth and looks down at the crossbow. He would trust her with this, and now she’s trusting him the same. It helps somehow that it’s his body at the end of his sights and not hers, but it’s still Furiosa in that body, still her who would be feeling the pain, paying the cost, at least in this moment, if he misses. She’s willing to do this, and he feels a connection to her that he hadn’t quite made before. He raises the crossbow and aims first at the potato on top of the sandbag beside her.  
  
_Thenk_. The bolt lands in the center of the potato, rocking it back only slightly from the impact. Bolstered by his success, he loads the crossbow again, still struggling to work with only one full arm without the years of practice she has behind her, then aims at the potato still balanced on his - her - head. His hand shakes ever so slightly, but he knows it’s far steadier than his own hand would be in this situation.  
  
Furiosa continues to stare steadily ahead, releasing a slow, though slightly less steady breath. She didn’t look down to see his shot in the first potato, but knows his aim was true, and it will be again.  
  
_Thenk_. A jolt rips through her, like she can feel the sound more than hear it. It’s not quite a pain, but for a second she’s sure he missed and hit her right in the chest. The thought that she might die comes second to the thought that she brought such injury on to his body - a sorting of priorities that is so unfamiliar to her it surprises her a bit, even having already acknowledged how much his safety means to her - but the fear is gone an instant later when she finds herself standing on the other side of the clearing, looking down the sight of the crossbow at Max’s body. _Thonk_. The potato hits the ground behind him.  
  
There’s a brief moment where they just stare at each other, checking in without the need for words, making sure the other is there, that they both just went through the same thing and it wasn’t a dream or wild hallucination. Max lets out a little laugh, half nerves, half relief, and looks behind him for the potato. He picks it up and inspects it. He didn’t quite hit the center, but got pretty damn close.  
  
Furiosa feels the same adrenaline in her body now as she had felt in his before he fired. He was as wired up holding the crossbow as she was standing in front of it, and she knows in the back of her mind that it wasn’t really the safety of his own body that had started that adrenaline flowing. Sometimes these days she misses that feeling, the rush, the heightened senses. She stares down at the crossbow in her hand, then glances up at Max. “Can I try?”


End file.
